Deadlock at Detroit

In a peak week last December, Goliath General Motors Corp. produced 53,000 automobiles. Last week with all its 69 automobile plants closed or crippled by strikes, the world's largest motor manufacturer turned out a piddling 1,500 units, mostly trucks. The idle bulk of its 135,000 production employes continued last week, the fifth of the strike, to lose around $800,000 per day in wages. For the first time G. M.'s 330.000 stockholders felt the pinch as quarterly dividends were lopped from 50-c- to 25-c--per share.

It was more than this crimp in Recovery, however, which caused President Roosevelt to intervene more directly and urgently last week than he has in any strike since he entered the White House. In Flint, after the riots and injunction against sit-downers which began the week (TIME, Feb. 8), the Motor War of 1937 threatened momentarily to explode in the bloodiest labor battle of U. S. history.

On penalty of $15,000,000 for its violation. Circuit Judge Paul Victor Gadola's injunction not only ordered sit-downers to evacuate Flint's two Fisher body plants.+- but also commanded strikers, leaders and sympathizers to cease all picketing and demonstration around G. M. plants throughout Michigan. With a roar the embattled unionists flung the judge's order back in his round, bespectacled face. Sheriff Thomas Wolcott read it to the sit-downers amid contemptuous silence, departed with a grin. The grim, bearded sit-downers telegraphed to Governor Frank Murphy their determination to die before obeying it. Thousands of outside sympathizers poured into Flint, joined the strikers' militant, red-bereted Women's Emergency Brigade in marching and picketing with brandished clubs. Spoiling for (Continued on p. 21) a tight, 1,000 bitter anti-unionists volunteered when a call went out for special deputy policemen. Virtually the entire remaining force of Michigan's 4,000 National Guardsmen marched in to join the troops already encamped in the tense city. Under their strategically-placed machine guns and one-pounders there was no more rioting. But Flint looked and felt like War (see pictures, p. 20).

Early in the week President Roosevelt called Governor Murphy on the telephone, authorized him to summon the war's opposing generals to a council table in the name of the President of the U. S. Under that pressure, General Motors abandoned its stubborn refusal to negotiate with the strike leaders until they had yielded up its captive plants. Twice had President Sloan rejected similar summonses by Secretary of Labor Perkins, but Executive Vice President Knudsen now wrote to Governor Murphy: "The wish of the President of the United States leaves no alternative except compliance."

Labor's Generalissimo, John L. Lewis, had already left for the Michigan front when the Presidential call went out. Fortified by the experience of many a bargaining conference, Leader Lewis possessed also a physical advantage when he sat down with other conferees in the office of Governor Murphy's brother George, a judge of Detroit's Recorder's Court. Frank Murphy is a red-headed dynamo, but he had not had a full night's sleep for five weeks. Husky Vice President Knudsen, according to one of his best friends, had "aged ten years in the past month." Strike Leader Homer Martin was worn to a frazzle, and C. I. O. Counsel Lee Pressman, third Labor representative, had just come from arguing the injunction suit before Judge Gadola. G. M.'s Finance Chairman Donaldson Brown and General Counsel John Thomas Smith showed the effects of the long weeks of responsibility.

Morning, afternoon & night for four days the tired men met and talked, firmly snagged on the one vital point at issue--John Lewis' demand that G. M. recognize United Automobile Workers as sole representative of all its employes. After the second day the opposing groups rarely saw each other, the Labor leaders remaining in Judge Murphy's office while the G. M. officials huddled around a telephone in the jury room. When they emerged to stretch their legs in the courtroom at the same time, Capital and Labor remained in opposite corners.

Leader Lewis was the first to back down. He offered to settle for sole recognition of his union in the 20 G. M. plants that were closed by strikers. The G. M. spokesmen were variously reported as offering to give him what he wanted in six plants, and in none. As John Lewis' temper wore thin, too, only three bonds held the negotiators together. One was President Roosevelt's insistence on an agreement, delivered in daily telephone calls to Governor Murphy. Another was fear of the public wrath which would fall on whichever side precipitated a breakup. The third was fear of the violence which would almost certainly erupt in Flint on news of the breakup.

At Governor Murphy's request, 250-lb. Sheriff Wolcott had made no move to enforce Judge Gadola's injunction. After three days a G. M. superintendent went to the judge, got a writ ordering arrest of the sit-downers and of 15 union officials, including Homer Martin, for contempt of court. To Detroit went word that Sheriff Wolcott was preparing to lead an army of Flint policemen, deputies, American Legionaries, sheriffs and General Motors police to serve the writ. Few hours after President Roosevelt sent to Congress his message on judicial reorganization (see p. 16), the supremacy of Executive over Judiciary was again asserted when Governor Murphy ordered Sheriff Wolcott to ignore Judge Gadola's writ. At week's end William Green wired to Governor Murphy that the executive council of the American Federation of Labor had adopted a ''hands off policy" which in effect endorsed Insurgent Lewis' strike, although the Federation promised jealously to protect the rights of G. M.'s craft unionists. Having digested that message, the conferees met at Governor Murphy's call for their eleventh session. That night G. M.'s Donaldson Brown, emphasizing that G. M. was not walking out of the conference, walked out with a firm statement rehearsing the causes of the deadlock, declaring that Leader Lewis had rejected a proposal to poll the workers secretly under Governor Murphy's supervision. G. M. promised to respond "to an early call . . . to .resume conferences," if in the Governor's judgment "any good can result therefrom." All Governor Murphy's energy went into persuading testy G. M. that good could result from another session next day. Meanwhile the Flint City Commission of Nine hastily delegated Mayor Harold Bradshaw with full powers to deal with the strike situation.

+-The Chevrolet assembly plant, seized in last week's rioting, was not included in G. M.'s petition for the injunction.

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